The invention described herein relates to a device for clamping a container to a filler valve, intended in particular for automatic bottling machinery of the type utilized in continuous liquid-batching processes.
The batching into bottles of liquids such as soda pop and mineral water is brought about currently with the aid of automatic machines, which in most instances are of the carousel type. Briefly, machines of the kind employ valves fitted to the periphery of a rotating structure, or carousel. These valves turn as one with the carousel in continuous rotation, and each incorporates a tube from which liquid is caused to flow into the bottle. A pedestal located directly below each valve receives single bottles from an infeed capstan, and is raised, usually by pneumatic actuator, up to the point where the bottle neck admits the tube and engages the valve by simple mechanical pressure. Arrival of the bottle in this position causes a cock to open, thereby permitting liquid to flow through the tube and into the bottle. Once the filling operation is completed, the pedestal is lowered once more, and the bottle conveyed away from the carousel by an exit capstan.
Machines of the type thus described subject the single bottles to a considerable degree of mechanical compression, which is withstood for the most part by glass bottles without any significant drawbacks, but which produces unacceptable degrees of distortion in plastic bottles, the use of which is steadily on the increase.
Attempts have been made to overcome the problem of compression by utilizing machines whose pedestals incoporate rods with a bifurcated component designed to lay hold, and thus discharge a part of the compressive stress, upon the bottle neck, which is generally the strongest section of the bottle. This particular method of dealing with the problem is unsatisfactory on two counts: first, it does not eliminate compression, since compressive stress is applied just the same, with inevitable distortion of the bottle; second, a machine already rendered complex in design by the inclusion of automated and pneumatically-actuated ascending-and-descending pedestals, is rendered even more complex by addition of the extra parts mentioned.
The object of the invention described herein is that of eliminating the drawbacks aforementioned, by setting forth a device which avoids imparting compressive stress to the bottle, and which at the same time is conductive to simple and economic embodiment of the bottling machine.